The ghost artist Tracing spectral embodiment as a figure of aesthetic resistance, in an unknown woman’s eighteenth century paintings, and works by Hilma af Klint and Louise Bourgeois

The Ghost Artist proposes an alternative history of women's art practice in which spectral embodiment replaces naturalistic body portrayal. In work by three artists, across three centuries, Self portrayal is traced as aesthetically resisting a unified body image and its inherently objectifying surface values. Displacing a summarizing viewpoint, works by Louise Bourgeois, Hilma af Klint, and Anon., are explored as presenting a fluctuating body, folding out of serial works, and coalescing on the edge of visibility.
McNab's paintings wordlessly haunt this analysis, connecting aesthetically to its propositions, and to a story of a woman artist's inner life that is recorded in the margins of the text. This triad of 'artistic history writing' presents a feminist perspective of slow and repeated looking at undervalued household surfaces, re-presented as a diffracted artistic record of this, as experience, and spectrally held within serial imagery requiring multiple viewpoints. The psychoanalytic framework that supports this approach unfurls backwards in time to reveal a genealogy of these ghostly portrayals, held within pictures of things, and within which a woman portrayed 'as' thing is also present. As metaphorical bodies, these artworks resist and return such dehumanisation by taking on the 'skins' of eighteenth century firewood, nineteenth century maps and embroideries, and twentieth century rooms and cages. Insistence on such displaced presence replaces classical portraiture with the aesthetic vitality of experience – a feminist re-scripting of objectification within ghost bodies notably created by older women artists, in their forties and later.